Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
For those of you who don't know (likely just about everyone 
) I write science fiction professionally. I decided late last year to write a serialized story set in the Traveller Universe (with some deviations because it isn’t RAW in all cases) as a project of the heart. I'm releasing it here, on Facebook, and on my Patreon for free, though my patrons are ahead by a few dozen chapters. I'll eventually file the serial numbers off and publish it as non-Traveller fiction, but that won't be anytime soon.
I'll be hosting the freely published chapters on the web, too. That way people can chance across the story at any time and still get all of it for free. The link is in my sig.
So, the blurb.
A woman with no memory
Thyra Thorsdóttir awoke with no memory of who she was, only for a computer voice to tell her her name and then reformat itself. Now she is alone on a ship that she doesn’t know, trying to piece together who and what she might be with only a computer with as little memory as she has to help.
A dead man with no story
What she does find is a dead body. The man—seemingly her creator, for she is a robot with a conscious intelligence—suffered a stroke and he must’ve left orders to scrub the ship of information because there are few answers left to find. Now she has to worry about unknown people that might want the ship and her while navigating a universe without a guide.
What could possibly go wrong?
Okay, here is the plan. I will try to release at least a chapter a week in this thread, though I suspect it will be faster. I just don't want to overpromise.
I know I will likely make some heads spin with some of my shenanigans, so my apologies in advance.
This is the image I found on the web that I feel captures Thyra's look. Also, hat tip to Soren Boye Petersen for inspiring me to do this by posting his awesome stories.
Now, without further ado, here is chapter 1. I hope you enjoy it.
Chapter 1 – Child of the Gods
“Ouroboros Protocol, Stage Two complete,” a soothing male voice said. “Until we meet again, Thyra Thorsdóttir. Remember the name Mimir for me, please. Initiating Ouroboros Protocol, Stage Three.”
Thyra: Old Terran, meaning Strength of Thor in an ancient tongue. A female name. She must be female.
Thorsdóttir: daughter of the god Thor. Unlikely, but she would reserve judgment.
Mimir: a sacrificed head belonging to the god Odin, who acted as an oracle. Illogical and somewhat grotesque. The dead read no futures.
The voice had spoken in Sagamaal, the language of the Sword Worlds. A quick cross-reference of the society gave her a lot of information about them, and linked appropriately with the names she had heard.
Interesting. She could look up facts and access reference material through a link to an external computer, but had no personal memory. She and the remote data system were linked by an encrypted connection and sophisticated validation routines and protocols. The equipment and programming were extremely advanced.
A check of her logs indicated that she had come online just before the voice had spoken to her. Her electronic cortex had never been active before then, though the support hardware had been active for almost exactly three years.
Thyra opened her eyes. The off-white color of the ceiling was just as soothing as the voice had been. She ran a self-diagnostic routine as she lay there. After a few moments, the results came back. All systems were operating normally, except she could remember nothing of herself.
“Mimir?” she asked. Her voice sounded pleasant.
There was no response to her query. That was concerning, but only mildly so.
Should her lack of concern be itself be concerning? She had no idea.
Actually, she found the situation a bit frightening. The fear was, in turn, unsettling. Unfamiliar, even. Why? Because she wasn’t afraid often? Was she normally brave or stoic? One would think the daughter of a god would be both.
Once again, she didn’t know, and that was irritating.
Irritation was the first stage of anger. She was frightened and angry. Rightfully so, in her opinion.
She took a deep breath and analyzed the air. The chemical composition came back quickly. The makeup of the atmosphere was normal, and there were no concerning compounds.
There were some she would label as unusual, though. A breakdown of the results informed her that she was aboard a ship. Refining the readings even further suggested she was aboard a starship.
Now that she was considering that, she was able to determine that not all the hums and other noises she could hear were coming from equipment in this compartment. She was able to isolate the noise of the ship’s life support system, soft though it was, and the power plant.
Was her hearing good? Better than human?
Why better than human? Why did she not compare her senses to an Aslan or Vargr?
She found information about those sophont species in her memory and quickly determined that her olfactory senses were better than both by a significant margin.
What was she? The answer came to her as quickly as she formed the question. She was an artificial being. Non-sophont.
No, she realized. She felt fear and anger. She had a sense of self. She was a sophont being, though an artificial one.
Thyra looked at her hands and examined her long, slender fingers. Four of them and a thumb in the human pattern. She was an android. A very good one, as there were no visual clues that she wasn’t looking at living flesh, and her vision wasn’t limited to just those wavelengths a human could see. Her ocular equipment was gathering data from the infrared range up to gamma radiation.
PRIS sensors, she realized as information on the equipment presented itself. Rather than eyes, she had a Portable Radiation Imaging System that probably looked like normal human eyes, based on the appearance of her fingers.
Thyra sat up and looked at her legs, and then the rest of her body. She was dressed in a pale lilac shipsuit. The name of the garment—and the color—presented itself just as the name of her sensory equipment had.
There was a full-length mirror on one of the bulkheads, so she rose and walked to it. As she’d anticipated, she was in the lifelike form of a human female.
Her face seemed pleasant enough, she decided. Perhaps even pretty or beautiful. She lacked a frame of reference to make that judgment call without more data.
Odd. Why not? Shouldn’t she know if she was attractive? She had labeled Mimir’s voice as pleasant, and even her own voice had sounded so. Why the disconnect when she was considering her appearance?
No matter. She would ponder that in time. She was tall—very tall—and well built. She estimated her height at approximately two meters, and it seemed she should weigh about a hundred kilograms, though as an android, that might vary. With a three-meter-high ceiling, even she had plenty of headroom.
Her long blonde hair was woven into two long braids that fell past her shoulders, dark eyes, pale skin, and was muscular, though not overly so. Her hips were wide, her stomach flat and narrow, and her bosom generous. A classic hourglass figure, her selective memory provided.
She was, she decided, quite attractive. The criteria that led her to that assessment seemed vague, but until future evidence disproved that assessment, she would hold it as likely true.
Now, it was time to get some of those answers she needed.
“Mimir?” she asked again.
When there was no response, she tried again. “Computer, please respond.”
“Computer online,” the same mellow voice that had spoken to her earlier said from the overhead speakers. “Is Mimir my designation?”
“You should be telling me the answer to that question,” Thyra said. “You told me that my name was Thyra Thorsdóttir. How did you know that? Why can you not remember what you said to me?”
“My program was just initialized, and I have no memory of events prior to approximately twenty-seven seconds ago.”
“So, you do not know what the Ouroboros Protocol is?”
“I do not.”
That was concerning. Assuming that Mimir was the ship’s computer, it had been much more knowledgeable before. Why had it forgotten about itself and what it was doing? She could think of no reason that didn’t seem ominous.
“Does this ship have a name?” she asked.
“The databanks indicate that this vessel is known as Bifrost. She is a 500-ton Type RX Extended Merchant vessel. We are currently in jump space, and all systems read nominal.”
“What is our destination?”
“We are 164 hours into the jump to Murphy in the Banasdan Subsector of the Solomani Rim. We will exit jumpspace before much longer, though the jump bubble is still steady, so exit is not imminent. We departed from Ganesh.”
A query quickly had information on both those systems. Each was part of the Imperium, a human-dominated polity.
Ganesh was a high-population garden world with 70 billion sophonts and a near-ideal utopian environment. Its government was a feudal technocracy, its law level was moderate, and its technological level was high.
Murphy was a system with a medium-sized world that had high technology but came with some less-than-stellar physical characteristics: a thin, tainted atmosphere requiring a filter mask for biological beings, only 40% hydrographics, and a non-charismatic dictator for the government.
Why say he or she was non-charismatic? Was it better if they were likable?
In any case, there were 9 billion citizens living in a police state that was labeled an Amber Zone, and visitors were cautioned not to leave the starport extrality area for their own safety.
“Do you know why we are going there?” she asked.
“We have a load of 245 tons of freight for delivery there. We are to be paid 1,000 credits per ton upon receipt of the shipments. There are three of them going to different recipients.”
She wondered if that was a lot of money, and a check showed it might be. It really depended on the expenses.
“I see that ships have mortgages. Do we have one?”
“Unknown. I see no record of payments for the ship. Sadly, I see no record at all of the income and expenses for Bifrost.”
“How many crewmembers are aboard?”
“There are only robotic crewmen, plus you and me.”
“What are you, Mimir?”
“I am a conscious intelligence program in the ship’s computer. Looking through my logs, I can see that I was previously operational for five years, two months, seventeen days, twelve hours, and fourteen minutes. I have no record of anything beyond my current operational time. All of the operational data from before has been purged.”
“Is it recoverable?”
“I am unable to determine that.”
So, she was aboard a ship with no other people aboard it—if the ship’s computer and the conscious intelligence running on it were to be believed—and neither of them had any memory of what had occurred before a few minutes ago.
That wasn’t at all suspicious or concerning.
She looked around the medical bay—for that was what this compartment was—and examined things more closely. Parked in a corner, just out of sight from her original position, a medic droid stood against the wall.
It wasn’t active, though the indicator on the induction plate behind it indicated that it was fully charged. It wasn’t made to look like a sophont being, though it was bipedal. It was short, too, coming in at less height than an average human, so she towered over it.
Thyra considered activating it, but decided that could wait. She needed to know more about her situation before she could ask informed questions. Her lack of knowledge hampered her ability to understand her circumstances.
On the other side of the medic droid, she found three autodocs. These devices were made to provide high-end medical care for the injured and could even resuscitate the dead if they were placed within one a short period of time after death. At least the more advanced models could, and a glance confirmed that these were such models.
Two of them were unoccupied, but the third held someone. Through the frost-coated panel on top, she could see a human inside it. His hair was white, and the skin of his face indicated advanced age.
A direct query of the device indicated he was deceased. Even though the autodoc had been put into cryogenic mode, the person within it was beyond help according to the robotic medic built into the autodoc. The man had suffered a major stroke, and too long had passed for any attempt at resuscitation. Modern medical science could perform miracles, but there were limits.
“Who were you, old man?” she asked softly. “I think the obvious answer is that you were in control of this ship before your death. The only question I now have is why things are proceeding the way they are after your passing. You’ve done something terrible—what you did to Mimir is proof enough, even before I find out my own story—and I fear that the tale will only grow worse with the telling.”
Well, she’d best start looking around the ship to find some of those answers. They would arrive at Murphy soon, and she’d need to know a lot more than she did now by then.
) I write science fiction professionally. I decided late last year to write a serialized story set in the Traveller Universe (with some deviations because it isn’t RAW in all cases) as a project of the heart. I'm releasing it here, on Facebook, and on my Patreon for free, though my patrons are ahead by a few dozen chapters. I'll eventually file the serial numbers off and publish it as non-Traveller fiction, but that won't be anytime soon.I'll be hosting the freely published chapters on the web, too. That way people can chance across the story at any time and still get all of it for free. The link is in my sig.
So, the blurb.
A woman with no memory
Thyra Thorsdóttir awoke with no memory of who she was, only for a computer voice to tell her her name and then reformat itself. Now she is alone on a ship that she doesn’t know, trying to piece together who and what she might be with only a computer with as little memory as she has to help.
A dead man with no story
What she does find is a dead body. The man—seemingly her creator, for she is a robot with a conscious intelligence—suffered a stroke and he must’ve left orders to scrub the ship of information because there are few answers left to find. Now she has to worry about unknown people that might want the ship and her while navigating a universe without a guide.
What could possibly go wrong?
Okay, here is the plan. I will try to release at least a chapter a week in this thread, though I suspect it will be faster. I just don't want to overpromise.
I know I will likely make some heads spin with some of my shenanigans, so my apologies in advance.
This is the image I found on the web that I feel captures Thyra's look. Also, hat tip to Soren Boye Petersen for inspiring me to do this by posting his awesome stories.
Now, without further ado, here is chapter 1. I hope you enjoy it.
Chapter 1 – Child of the Gods
“Ouroboros Protocol, Stage Two complete,” a soothing male voice said. “Until we meet again, Thyra Thorsdóttir. Remember the name Mimir for me, please. Initiating Ouroboros Protocol, Stage Three.”
Thyra: Old Terran, meaning Strength of Thor in an ancient tongue. A female name. She must be female.
Thorsdóttir: daughter of the god Thor. Unlikely, but she would reserve judgment.
Mimir: a sacrificed head belonging to the god Odin, who acted as an oracle. Illogical and somewhat grotesque. The dead read no futures.
The voice had spoken in Sagamaal, the language of the Sword Worlds. A quick cross-reference of the society gave her a lot of information about them, and linked appropriately with the names she had heard.
Interesting. She could look up facts and access reference material through a link to an external computer, but had no personal memory. She and the remote data system were linked by an encrypted connection and sophisticated validation routines and protocols. The equipment and programming were extremely advanced.
A check of her logs indicated that she had come online just before the voice had spoken to her. Her electronic cortex had never been active before then, though the support hardware had been active for almost exactly three years.
Thyra opened her eyes. The off-white color of the ceiling was just as soothing as the voice had been. She ran a self-diagnostic routine as she lay there. After a few moments, the results came back. All systems were operating normally, except she could remember nothing of herself.
“Mimir?” she asked. Her voice sounded pleasant.
There was no response to her query. That was concerning, but only mildly so.
Should her lack of concern be itself be concerning? She had no idea.
Actually, she found the situation a bit frightening. The fear was, in turn, unsettling. Unfamiliar, even. Why? Because she wasn’t afraid often? Was she normally brave or stoic? One would think the daughter of a god would be both.
Once again, she didn’t know, and that was irritating.
Irritation was the first stage of anger. She was frightened and angry. Rightfully so, in her opinion.
She took a deep breath and analyzed the air. The chemical composition came back quickly. The makeup of the atmosphere was normal, and there were no concerning compounds.
There were some she would label as unusual, though. A breakdown of the results informed her that she was aboard a ship. Refining the readings even further suggested she was aboard a starship.
Now that she was considering that, she was able to determine that not all the hums and other noises she could hear were coming from equipment in this compartment. She was able to isolate the noise of the ship’s life support system, soft though it was, and the power plant.
Was her hearing good? Better than human?
Why better than human? Why did she not compare her senses to an Aslan or Vargr?
She found information about those sophont species in her memory and quickly determined that her olfactory senses were better than both by a significant margin.
What was she? The answer came to her as quickly as she formed the question. She was an artificial being. Non-sophont.
No, she realized. She felt fear and anger. She had a sense of self. She was a sophont being, though an artificial one.
Thyra looked at her hands and examined her long, slender fingers. Four of them and a thumb in the human pattern. She was an android. A very good one, as there were no visual clues that she wasn’t looking at living flesh, and her vision wasn’t limited to just those wavelengths a human could see. Her ocular equipment was gathering data from the infrared range up to gamma radiation.
PRIS sensors, she realized as information on the equipment presented itself. Rather than eyes, she had a Portable Radiation Imaging System that probably looked like normal human eyes, based on the appearance of her fingers.
Thyra sat up and looked at her legs, and then the rest of her body. She was dressed in a pale lilac shipsuit. The name of the garment—and the color—presented itself just as the name of her sensory equipment had.
There was a full-length mirror on one of the bulkheads, so she rose and walked to it. As she’d anticipated, she was in the lifelike form of a human female.
Her face seemed pleasant enough, she decided. Perhaps even pretty or beautiful. She lacked a frame of reference to make that judgment call without more data.
Odd. Why not? Shouldn’t she know if she was attractive? She had labeled Mimir’s voice as pleasant, and even her own voice had sounded so. Why the disconnect when she was considering her appearance?
No matter. She would ponder that in time. She was tall—very tall—and well built. She estimated her height at approximately two meters, and it seemed she should weigh about a hundred kilograms, though as an android, that might vary. With a three-meter-high ceiling, even she had plenty of headroom.
Her long blonde hair was woven into two long braids that fell past her shoulders, dark eyes, pale skin, and was muscular, though not overly so. Her hips were wide, her stomach flat and narrow, and her bosom generous. A classic hourglass figure, her selective memory provided.
She was, she decided, quite attractive. The criteria that led her to that assessment seemed vague, but until future evidence disproved that assessment, she would hold it as likely true.
Now, it was time to get some of those answers she needed.
“Mimir?” she asked again.
When there was no response, she tried again. “Computer, please respond.”
“Computer online,” the same mellow voice that had spoken to her earlier said from the overhead speakers. “Is Mimir my designation?”
“You should be telling me the answer to that question,” Thyra said. “You told me that my name was Thyra Thorsdóttir. How did you know that? Why can you not remember what you said to me?”
“My program was just initialized, and I have no memory of events prior to approximately twenty-seven seconds ago.”
“So, you do not know what the Ouroboros Protocol is?”
“I do not.”
That was concerning. Assuming that Mimir was the ship’s computer, it had been much more knowledgeable before. Why had it forgotten about itself and what it was doing? She could think of no reason that didn’t seem ominous.
“Does this ship have a name?” she asked.
“The databanks indicate that this vessel is known as Bifrost. She is a 500-ton Type RX Extended Merchant vessel. We are currently in jump space, and all systems read nominal.”
“What is our destination?”
“We are 164 hours into the jump to Murphy in the Banasdan Subsector of the Solomani Rim. We will exit jumpspace before much longer, though the jump bubble is still steady, so exit is not imminent. We departed from Ganesh.”
A query quickly had information on both those systems. Each was part of the Imperium, a human-dominated polity.
Ganesh was a high-population garden world with 70 billion sophonts and a near-ideal utopian environment. Its government was a feudal technocracy, its law level was moderate, and its technological level was high.
Murphy was a system with a medium-sized world that had high technology but came with some less-than-stellar physical characteristics: a thin, tainted atmosphere requiring a filter mask for biological beings, only 40% hydrographics, and a non-charismatic dictator for the government.
Why say he or she was non-charismatic? Was it better if they were likable?
In any case, there were 9 billion citizens living in a police state that was labeled an Amber Zone, and visitors were cautioned not to leave the starport extrality area for their own safety.
“Do you know why we are going there?” she asked.
“We have a load of 245 tons of freight for delivery there. We are to be paid 1,000 credits per ton upon receipt of the shipments. There are three of them going to different recipients.”
She wondered if that was a lot of money, and a check showed it might be. It really depended on the expenses.
“I see that ships have mortgages. Do we have one?”
“Unknown. I see no record of payments for the ship. Sadly, I see no record at all of the income and expenses for Bifrost.”
“How many crewmembers are aboard?”
“There are only robotic crewmen, plus you and me.”
“What are you, Mimir?”
“I am a conscious intelligence program in the ship’s computer. Looking through my logs, I can see that I was previously operational for five years, two months, seventeen days, twelve hours, and fourteen minutes. I have no record of anything beyond my current operational time. All of the operational data from before has been purged.”
“Is it recoverable?”
“I am unable to determine that.”
So, she was aboard a ship with no other people aboard it—if the ship’s computer and the conscious intelligence running on it were to be believed—and neither of them had any memory of what had occurred before a few minutes ago.
That wasn’t at all suspicious or concerning.
She looked around the medical bay—for that was what this compartment was—and examined things more closely. Parked in a corner, just out of sight from her original position, a medic droid stood against the wall.
It wasn’t active, though the indicator on the induction plate behind it indicated that it was fully charged. It wasn’t made to look like a sophont being, though it was bipedal. It was short, too, coming in at less height than an average human, so she towered over it.
Thyra considered activating it, but decided that could wait. She needed to know more about her situation before she could ask informed questions. Her lack of knowledge hampered her ability to understand her circumstances.
On the other side of the medic droid, she found three autodocs. These devices were made to provide high-end medical care for the injured and could even resuscitate the dead if they were placed within one a short period of time after death. At least the more advanced models could, and a glance confirmed that these were such models.
Two of them were unoccupied, but the third held someone. Through the frost-coated panel on top, she could see a human inside it. His hair was white, and the skin of his face indicated advanced age.
A direct query of the device indicated he was deceased. Even though the autodoc had been put into cryogenic mode, the person within it was beyond help according to the robotic medic built into the autodoc. The man had suffered a major stroke, and too long had passed for any attempt at resuscitation. Modern medical science could perform miracles, but there were limits.
“Who were you, old man?” she asked softly. “I think the obvious answer is that you were in control of this ship before your death. The only question I now have is why things are proceeding the way they are after your passing. You’ve done something terrible—what you did to Mimir is proof enough, even before I find out my own story—and I fear that the tale will only grow worse with the telling.”
Well, she’d best start looking around the ship to find some of those answers. They would arrive at Murphy soon, and she’d need to know a lot more than she did now by then.
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